Prick up your Ears finds origins in the posthumous rehashing of a murder/suicide, and the cotton fiber tableau of an orgiastic subculture, both in commodity-form: “I’ve discovered that I look better in cheap clothes…” the t-shirt, inscribed with Ortontinged memoriam continues, “I’m from the gutter and don’t you ever forget it because I won’t.” The T-Shirt Speaks. And what started as a parody of consumption became the real thing, affixed to institution, the motto had emerged “art for art’s sake;” an index of autonomy built on displays of wealth and communion in commerce: this was the ontology of fake. So what do we ask in renewing this parody? A somatechnic, “a body of work,” a metricalized mimesis as these artworks secrete the new business style, the transnational yuppie, no success without excess…But this is serious too, as Doc Fanon said: “the prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots of the structure.”*

Is it radical to assume we are the ones, who rally in disgust…contest derision and deprivation? Perhaps this is the beginning of prognosis. This time it won’t be about refusal, but eliding the forces of consumption and commodification with fullness; with glee in desire and fucking joy in utopian cruising: this is about play—play imbricated in production… Really, what does art do behind the sphere of exchange? This is capital’s hidden abode…the new loot, “the forward-dawning significance of the gesture”** but not for futurity; this is radical hope—hope in now ness stitched in dolls and gowns and garment labels, corporate models hoping for snow crash.